Stepped On And Looked Down

“Nature is like a woman who enjoys disguising herself, and whose different disguises, revealing now one part of her ad now another, permit those who study her and assiduously to hope that one day they may know the whole of her person” (Diderot)

In this photographic installation of 12 doormats (also available as prints), the viewer is invited to literally step on and look down on women and nature. Vinogradoff means to create an uncomfortable tension with the fragile double exposure of the female form and plant material combined with the austerity of the presentation. This work looks with forthrightness at both ideological construction of gender and at our often abusive and destructive relationship with nature. Vinogradoff investigates the way in which women have been identified with nature throughout the ages – their ‘natural’ personas described at once passive and nurturing, wild and uncontrollable, and asks how these metaphors serve as cultural constraints. The artist explores through her work how a patriarchal value system leads to the subjugation of both women and nature. The observable inferiority of female existence and the exploitation of the natural world is the backbone of this rationale.